U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs

The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with "unidentified aircraft," a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says.

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

"As part of this effort," it added, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting what the military now calls "unexplained aerial phenomena" — rather than "unidentified flying objects" — would be a “sea change.”

“Right now, we have situation in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored rather than anomalies to be explored,” he said. “We have systems that exclude that information and dump it.”

For example, Mellon said “in a lot of cases [military personnel] don’t know what to do with that information — like satellite data or a radar that sees something going Mach 3. They will dump [the data] because that is not a traditional aircraft or missile.”

The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a dedicated office inside the Defense Intelligence Agency to study UAPs at the urging of several senators who secretly set aside appropriations for the effort.

That office spent some $25 million conducting a series of technical studies and evaluating numerous unexplained incursions, including one that lasted several days involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004. In that case, Navy fighter jets were outmaneuvered by unidentified aircraft that flew in ways that appeared to defy the laws of known physics.

Raytheon, a leading defense contractor, used the reports and official Defense Department video of the sightings off the coast of California to hail one of its radar systems for capturing the phenomena.

The Pentagon's UFO research office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program, was officially wound down in 2012 when the congressional earmark ran out.

But more lawmakers are now asking questions, the Navy also reports.

"In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety," the service said in its statement to POLITICO.

The Navy declined to identify who has been briefed, nor would it provide more details on the guidelines for reporting that are being drafted for the fleet. The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Advocates for treating such sightings as a potential national security threat have long criticized military leaders for giving the phenomenon relatively little attention and for encouraging a culture in which personnel feel that speaking up about it could hurt their career.

Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who ran the so-called AATIP office, complained after he retired from government service that the Pentagon's approach to these unidentified aircraft has been far too blasé.
"If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something," Elizondo said. "With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: 'If you do see something, don't say something.'"

He added that because these mysterious aircraft "don't have a tail number or a flag — in some cases not even a tail — it's crickets. What happens in five years if it turns out these are extremely advanced Russian aircraft?"

Elizondo will be featured in an upcoming documentary series about the Pentagon UFO research he oversaw. He said the six-part series will reveal more recent sightings of UAPs by dozens of military pilots.

In response to my inquiry to the Navy, they emailed me the complete statement, which
was attributed to Joseph Gradisher, spokesperson for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare.

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years. For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the USAF take these reports very seriously and investigate each and every report. As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft. In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who
reported hazards to aviation safety."

A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue.
“Since 2014, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis,” Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month. “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.”

Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it “the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”

Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was less laudatory.
“I don’t believe in safety through ignorance,” he said, scolding the intelligence community for a lack of “curiosity and courage” and a “failure to react” to a strong pattern of sightings.

In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

“It’s very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed,” he said, calling it a “truly radical technology.”

According to Mellon, awestruck and baffled pilots, concerned that reporting unidentified flying aircraft would adversely affect their careers, tended not to speak up. And when they did, he said, there was little interest in investigating their claims.

“Imagine you see highly advanced vehicles, they appear on radar systems, they look bizarre, no one knows where they’re from. This happens on a recurring basis, and no one does anything,” said Mellon, who now works with UFOData, a private organization. Because agencies do not share this type of information, it is difficult to know the full extent of activity. Still, he estimated that dozens of incidents were witnessed by naval officers in a single year, enough to force the service to address the issue.

“Pilots are upset, and they’re trying to help wake up a slumbering system,” he told The Post.

Lawmakers’ growing curiosity and concern also appeared to coax action out of the Navy.

In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats.” As The Post’s Joby Warrick reported, the investigation ranged from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters.”

According to former Pentagon officials and documents previously seen by The Post, program funding, which totaled at least $22 million, was suspended in 2012.

Gradisher said in a statement that “in response to requests for information from congressional members and staff, officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety."

Elizondo, who ran the AATIP, said the newly drafted guidelines were a culmination of many things, most notably that the Navy had enough credible evidence — including eyewitness accounts and corroborating radar information — to “know this is occurring.”

“If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security,” Elizondo said.

With the number of U.S. military personnel in the Air Force and Navy who described the same observations, the noise level could not be ignored.

“This type of activity is very alarming,” Elizondo said, “and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”
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This is a worthwhile article from the Washington Post, which contains one weighty quote from the Navy spokesman not found in the story as originally reported in POLITICO a day earlier:

Since 2014, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis,” Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month. “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”​

Nevertheless, the original reporting on the Navy story was done by Bryan Bender at POLITICO, and it is breach of journalistic standards that the Washington Post did not acknowledge this in its report.

I think its a substantial admission although I think it also inevitable, and its just a matter of time before the US military finally admit we are being visited by non-terrestrial beings...Whether we see that latter admission in our lifetimes or not is another matter lol...

Interesting article. It affirmed just what I've said in various threads about this.

"There is no better place to test such a system than against the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group with its CEC abilities during its workup off the Baja Coast. It is not an operational environment. Aircraft are not armed and nobody is expecting a fight."

Great live test for a new piece of gear. Nobody's shooting at it and if one comes down it's in friendly territory.

"In addition, the fact is that the U.S. government has poured the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars each year into the black budget for the better part of a century. The idea that somewhere along the way they got lucky and made major breakthroughs in highly exotic technologies may not be convenient to believe as a possibility for those that have grander visions for the unexplained, but I contend that it is quite plausible."

Ben Rich, a Lockheed's Skunk Works chief that is largely credited for giving birth to stealth technology as we know it today. For instance, Rich told Popular Mechanics the following that underscores just how long major breakthroughs in man-made clandestine aerospace technology can stay hidden:

"There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t have them yet."

35 years ago I was working on electromechanical switching systems because they were still in common use and were the standard for the era. If anyone told me then that in the future we'd all have handheld itty bitty supercomputers (relatively speaking) jacked into a global communication grid, or have self driving cars, or any number of things I probably would have laughed them off as improbable, to say the least.

That said, a pity the Navy's reporting initiative isn't for all services and maybe even for federal law enforcement. But imagine the traffic something like that might generate and the overhead required to maintain it. This would be a great place for standardized forms and an open database.